In Spain, as everywhere, the question is whether schools can reopen safely. I have grave doubts
Over the next couple of weeks, as happens every year at this time, Spain will begin the return to academic activity. The problem is that this is a far-from normal year: let’s be honest, it’s been a deeply abnormal year; and nor is my country behaving like a normal nation.
In short, it’s clear that Spain has managed the impact of Covid-19 badly. The term virus laggard, used recently by The Washington Post, is bang on target: Spain sits ninth in the world ranking of the number of infections, but only because those above it, with the exception of Peru, have much bigger populations. If we take a relative parameter, such as the number of deaths per million inhabitants, only Belgium and the aforementioned Peru surpass us, and it is very possible that the Belgian case is due to different accounting criteria.
We may be scandalized by how badly the United States has handled the pandemic, thanks to the pathetic individual currently occupying the White House, but the reality is that, despite being a much smaller country, in relative terms, Spain has done much worse. Once again, with the sole exception of Peru, the data shows that Spain’s handling of the situation has been much worse than the rest of the developed world, and although it managed to avoid saturation of its…
